Language, as a societal construct, is the enemy.
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"And besides, cinema is a language." – Andre Bazin
I take no shame in admitting that upon my first viewing of "Le Gai savoir" (1969), I don´t understand the film particularly well. It is one of Godard´s most complex and theoretically-structured projects that demands nothing less of the viewer and a complete revision of the very concept of language, at least audiovisual language.
It´s not really my fault that I can´t fully grasp the film´s intricacies. My graduate film professor, Dr. Warren Buckland, had every opportunity to educate me in the field of semiotics. After all, he´s the guy who wrote "The Cognitive Semiotics of Film." Instead, he chose to spend his lecture time deconstructing the Dreamworks logo and forcing us to watch "Blue Steel." Had I received a proper education in semiotics, I would know more about the sources of inspiration for "Le Gai savoir" from Roland Barthes to Christian Metz to Jacques Derrida.
Rather than burden you with a definition of the term "semiotics" (after all, how would I know with such a neglected education) and the difference between structuralism and post-structuralism, I will simply say that Godard concerns himself with the tenuous and changing relationship between sound and image, and between words and meaning. This is a project that concerned Godard from his earliest days as a critic and filmmaker, but first flowered on screen with his Roland Barthes-inspired science-fiction/noir/vampire/detective/romance "Alphaville" (1964.)
The film was originally commissioned as an adaptation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau´s "Émile" which describes the education of a child who is allowed to learn in an environment without structure. Godard, of course, co-opts the material for his own purposes and produces a film with only a tangential relation to the source. Émile Rousseau (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Patricia Lumumba (Juliet Berto) meet in a pitch-blank abandoned television studio. Much of the film consists of shots of the two of them against a black backdrop. They decide to embark on a three year project to study revolutionary theory and to deconstruct language, to "return to zero," essentially a reversal of direction of the Rousseau novel. The goal is to peel away all the societal filters that color their understanding of words and images, and comprehend them on a basic, personal level – true individual understanding built from the ground up (or, rather, by tearing the entire building to its foundations.) Language, as a societal construct, is the enemy.
Godard intersperses fleeting documentary-style shots of Paris as the revolutionaries launch daily "missions." But even these images of "reality" cannot be assumed to be unfiltered, to in any way make the "real" a direct referent. Godard also bombards the viewer with audiovisual montages that cover the gamut from highbrow intellectual texts to pop culture images (the cover of a Derrida book to Spider-Man, among a host of other infinitely pliable signifiers.) The "dissolution" of image and word is taken to such extremes that Émile and Patricia even speak individual vowel and consonant sounds to understand subtle and unspoken differences for themselves.
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